SharePoint and CRM

Microsoft SharePoint is an enterprise collaboration platform designed to manage lists of data and documents, whereas Microsoft Dynamics CRM is designed to support relationships between data and documents. You can compose custom code to model your business and use many of the features in SharePoint to surface data from other systems.

By integrating CRM and SharePoint document management, it is possible to share CRM data with customers and enable them to submit requests, track status, view information, and see results through SharePoint. SharePoint can also be used within an organization to store and share business documents and CRM data. SharePoint also helps to create and visualize reports and data through Web-based dashboards and shared workflow.

Setting Up SharePoint with CRM:

Step 1: Download and install Microsoft Dynamics List Component to SharePoint. Ensure that the status of the solution is Activated. If not, press Activate button from the ribbon.

Step 2: Configure Document Settings in Dynamics CRM—choose which record types to allow document storage.

Step 3: Validate the SharePoint URL in CRM.

Step 4: Choose the entities to be enabled for Document Management.

Accessing CRM from SharePoint:

Approaches for accessing CRM from SharePoint:

1. For SharePoint 2010/2013 Server On-Premises, configure SharePoint BCS with CRM database. Since direct access to filtered views in CRM database is supported, create external content types against these filtered views in SharePoint without any code. The only major drawback is that the access is read only and works only for On-Premises.

2. Use the List Web Part for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. Although not a supported feature within CRM 2011, this blog does a great job at explaining how CRM 4.0 List Web part can work with CRM 2011 deployment. This is simple to configure without any code.

3. Using a proxy web service, configure SharePoint BCS with CRM WCF services. Use the BCS Connector for this.

4. Develop a Silverlight Web Part or an ASP.net Visual Web Part in SharePoint. Although this may require lots of effort in coding, it gives endless possibilities to customize as per your requirements.